By Alonzo WestonSt. Joseph News-Press

Texting. Cell phones. Social net-working sites. Twitter.

Add these technological communi-cation advances to the list of things some experts say distract students from learning. They’re seen as seri-ous distractions that keep students from focusing on their schoolwork.

These things hinder students’ abil-ity to think deeply and solve com-plex problems, said Maggie Jackson, author of “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.” Devices meant to aid commu-nication are helping to destroy it.

“You cannot be creative,” Ms. Jackson said in a USA Today article. “Texting is undermining kids’ op-portunities to learn. ... They will shy away from challenging material.”

Kate Conrath, a Los Angeles School District teacher quoted in American Teacher magazine, said social networking is akin to watch-ing too much television. She said it’s a major distraction with no viable benefit.

“Preoccupation with these sites has completely taken over as the major procrastination tool in stu-dents’ free time,” Ms. Conrath said in the article. “Students avoiding homework and studying are attract-ed to these time dumps like moths to a lamp.”

And it’s an issue that is not going to disappear any time soon. Accord-ing to a Nielsen study, teens aver-aged 80 texts a day in 2008. That fig-ure doubled from the previous year.

But peer into Sean Nash’s Ma-rine Biology class at Benton High School, and you see students using Facebook-like applications, Twitter and cell phones in their studies. His class embraces the technology rath-er than avoids it.

“It’s not like when you and I were in school,” Mr. Nash said. “When you or I walked into the classroom, we expected the teacher to stand up there and tell us everything we needed to know, and we wrote it all down and took a test later. Well, kids today live in a world that’s so me-dia-connected. You walk into a room that feels like that today, and they just shut down.”

He said educators today realize that for kids to really learn, they should be more in charge of their

learning.“The teacher is the expert learner

in the room. We’ve got a curriculum

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Benton High School teacher Sean Nash works with junior, Ally Sexton, 16, during a dual credit Principles of Biology class Friday. Mr. Nash uses different social media tools to assist with his teaching plans.

TODD WeDDle/St. Joseph News-Press

By Jesse WAsHInGtonAssociated Press

Quick: Name a leader of the national Hispanic community.

That’s not easy for some Hispanics, let alone other Americans. Even as the Arizona immi-gration debate has highlighted concerns of the nation’s more than 30 million Latino citizens, it has revealed a lack of name-brand recognition for those dedicated to serving America’s largest minority group.

This relative obscurity is largely due to the di-versity of Latinos, who come from many coun-tries and cultures with unique concerns that are not easily lumped together — but often are.

“When you’re in Colombia, you’re a Colombi-an. When you’re in Puerto Rico, you’re a Puerto Rican. When you’re in the U.S., you’re a Latino or Hispanic,” said Eric Cortes, a Philadelphia resi-dent and member of a local leadership institute that trains people to work in the Latino commu-nity.

Cortes could not recall the names of any lead-ers of national Latino organizations, but he knew many locally based activists.

“I feel like every state or region has that person doing national campaigns for rights. ... It’s hard to pinpoint one person,” he said.

There are, in fact, many Latino leaders with na-tional impact.

Who guides Latinos in America today?Embracing the technology

Benton High makes the most of social

networking

By Alonzo WestonSt. Joseph News-Press

Connie Stubler would have retired from the St. Joseph School District 10 years ago, when her husband asked her to move to Phoenix.

For the Coleman Elementary fourth-grade teacher, it was a $12,000 decision. That’s the one-time amount she would receive from the district’s Longevity Incentive Plan if she continued teaching another 10 years, retiring after 32 years of service.

“I told him no, we’re staying here because I’ve got this money coming in. So we turned down the transfer to Phoenix to stay for it,” Ms. Stubler said.

Turns out she stayed around for nothing. The St. Joseph Board of Education voted to discontin-ue the Longevity Incentive Plan shortly after the first school levy failed last year.

Ms. Stubler said she and other teachers who will retire this year thought the district would re-instate the incentive after the levy passed.

Teachers irkedby discontinued

longevity pay

By RyAn DAvIsSt. Joseph News-Press

In the wake of Bernard Jackson’s arrest, Triumph Foods will review its criminal background check policy.

“Certainly, we will be looking at our process of background reviews in light of this incident with Mr. Jackson,” said Patt Lilly, chief ad-ministrative officer for Triumph.

Mr. Lilly said the company does

perform criminal background checks on all of its supervisors and administrative staff. However, it does not perform criminal back-ground checks on its hourly produc-tion employees.

Mr. Jackson was an hourly pro-duction employee. He was charged Thursday with a variety of offenses, including six counts of rape. Before this, Mr. Jackson had been in and out of prison.

He obtained a job with Triumph in 2009 after falsifying his application for employment. The company fired Mr. Jackson Thursday.

Mr. Lilly noted that the company does request certain information as part of the application process, in-cluding information regarding any criminal history or interruptions in past employment.

Triumph Foods to review criminalbackground check policy

Students log into a discussion form to post comments and propose ideas during class.

TODD WeDDle/St. Joseph News-Press

Arizona debate highlights lack of Hispanic leaders

‘‘When we learn from different websites,

we can learn on our own and explore on our own and figure out our own way to learn it, versus the teacher’s way, because we all learn so different.SHANdiS Cruz,student in Mr. Nash’s class

Retiring educators lose thousands as district halts longtime supplement plan

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Details in SPORTSCOCO WAlTeRSSt. Joseph News-Press

we follow to make sure kids learn these things, but how they learn I think, we’ve turned the corner and are realizing stu-dents are allowed to build their own knowledge in this way,” Mr. Nash said.

Benton, unlike many high schools, doesn’t ban cell phones. Kids can use them in the hallways between classes, before and after school and in the lunch room. Many other classrooms beside Mr. Nash’s use them as teaching instru-ments. Some teachers Twitter homework assignments and other information to students and use the mechanism to com-municate with other educators as well.

“Actually, I would say we have a pretty progressive cell phone policy at Benton,” said Jeannette Westfall, Benton co-prin-cipal. “We’re pretty well-known nation-ally for our policy. We’ve shared our cell phone policy with schools across the na-tion because they want to know how we handle it and why. Cell phones are not a problem for us, and the reason is, we allow

teachers to direct their use, just like you do with a pencil, do with a computer.”

Dr. Westfall said misuse of cell phones is looked at in the same way the misuse of markers, crayons and other things in the classroom. How they’re used makes the difference.

“We don’t make a differentiation be-tween the tools,” Dr. Westfall explained. “We discipline the student for the inap-propriate use of a paper clip, and we do the same thing with a cell phone.”

In Mr. Nash’s classroom, students can log onto to a Facebook-like application that he created for Marine Biology stud-ies called Principles of Biology. Here they can post photos, interact with their peers and former students, professors

and biologists from around the world. They also use their cell phones to post photos. Posting to the site enhances the students’ writing ability, Mr. Nash said.

“They know that 105,000 unique people from all over the world from 163 different countries are looking at this website,” he said. “They know when they write some-thing, all sorts of eyes are going to be look-ing at it, and it really improves their work. All of a sudden it’s not just for Mr. Nash.”

Shandis Cruz, a student in the class, said when a teacher recites from a textbook, he’s merely repeating what’s in the book. That limits students’ capacity to learn, she said.

“When we learn from different web-sites, we can learn on our own and explore on our own and figure out our own way to

learn it, versus the teacher’s way, because we all learn so different,” she said.

Korby Trautman, another student, said certain smart cell phones can hold tons of information that can be useful in the classroom.

“If you have an iPhone, you can have like a periodic table on your phone and a bunch of different tools and resources for different classes,” he said.

Mr. Nash said social networking feels like a huge technology revolution, when it’s actually a communication revolu-tion. Social networking has been around as long as the Internet, he said.

“I think another piece of mythology is that when you’re talking to people through a computer, you’re distancing yourself from people,” he said. “In reality, I think it helps bring us closer together because these are people we see in the hallway on a regular day. But it is kind of interesting seeing what other people are reading and what they’re thinking about.”

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com.

CONTINUED FROM Page A1

Benton High embraces social media

‘‘Actually, I would say we have a pretty progressive cell phone policy at Benton. We’re pretty well-known nationally for our

policy. ...Jeannette Westfall, Benton co-principal

Associated Press

BRUSSELS — The Ice-landic volcano with the unpronounceable name reminded the world again that it has the power to dis-rupt international travel — coughing out a spreading cloud of ash that delayed or canceled hundreds of

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The prospects for Sun-day flights remained grim, with no improvement in sight for trans-Atlan-tic passengers, and with a plume of low-altitude ash continuing to float eastward over Spain and southern France.

Ash delays, reroutes trans-Atlantic flights

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